Forum:Other MA versions
(de) German version Statistics : 5500 articles since May 2004 * Nothing for the moment (eo) Esperanto edition Statistics : 5 articles since September 2005 I don't mean to hurt the feelings of whoever initiated it, but I really don't believe we should have an Esperanto edition. As I stated somewhere above, many non-native English speakers prefer reading MA in English over their own language, and I just can't see any benefit in adding another layer of complexity to the project when we have two editions (Swedish, Polish) which are already in a state of disrepair. Wouldn't we be better off without the Esperanto one? --Vedek Dukat Talk | Duty Roster 21:17, 13 April 2006 (UTC) :There seem to be (little but) activity on it actually. As long as people are interested in, I don't see any problem with it - Philoust123 10:42, 14 April 2006 (UTC) :I created a very, very basic page on the Esperanto wiki, but I was experimenting with the language while reading a tutorial. I agree entirely with the Vedek's assessment. If I was going to learn a language for the sake of Memory Alpha, it would be Spanish, which I learned in high school. Weyoun 19:07, 14 April 2006 (UTC) (es) Spanish version Statistics : 5300 articles since ? In case you missed its casual introduction into the MA family, we now have a Spanish edition, and I'd like to make a few notes on it in case this causes confusion: * What is now MA/es was originally "Trekkipedia" (a better name for MA, IMHO, but that's another issue) which is why formatting may be different from what you're used to. For example, most articles don't begin with a bolded declaration of the topic, and citations are much less frequent at present. This will change as time goes on, so feel free to adjust things accordingly. * You will probably have to re-register, as the user base (at present) is not pooled with that of Wikia and by extension Memory Alpha. * Performers and production staff formerly had articles using last name, first name; if you come across any of these articles, please move them to first name last name format. * Titles are something I need to discuss with the admin, because Star Trek is known as "Viaje a las estrellas" in Spanish and I'm not sure how much translating will be done in that respect. Any other questions, feel free to contact me or the admin on there. Thanks! --Vedek Dukat Duty Roster 07:22, 11 April 2006 (UTC) :I don't speak a single word of spanish, so I'm just putting this here - was the former "Trekkiepedia" published under a compatible Creative Commons License, so that the content could be reused, or how do they work around that? -- Cid Highwind 07:37, 11 April 2006 (UTC) :: I don't speak spanish either, though it is sometimes rather simple to guess what one article means in english (or German). In order to get the interwikis set up: Vedek can you please set interwikis there, where the spanish page title is not the same as the english one? -- Kobi - [[ :Kobi|( )]] 12:52, 11 April 2006 (UTC) :::Licensing: Umm, it didn't -have- a license, so I think they're just adopting MA's CC license. It was formerly hosted on a server in Argentina, so I have no idea what that means in "legalese", but es:Ocupación de Bajor is a translation-in-progress of one of our absolute best articles. :::Interwiki: Sure, I'll make sure the links stay up to date, although it gets to be a bigger and bigger pain as we open more and more editions of Memory Alpha. But that's a good thing, so I don't mind. ;) --Vedek Dukat Talk | Duty Roster 22:12, 11 April 2006 (UTC) ::Hi, my name is Omar, from Argentina, and one of the creators of the original "Trekkipedia". I not fluent in English, but I sure what the "Trekkipedia" was 100% compatible with the CC Licence. LL&P --ElAuriano 16:55, 12 April 2006 (UTC) (fr) French version Statistics : 1100 articles since November 2005 * Nothing for the moment (hoping it will stay so :) - Philoust123 10:38, 14 April 2006 (UTC) (nl) Dutch version Statistics : 3600 articles since April 2004 * Nothing for the moment (pl) Polish version Statistics : 6 articles since ? 2005 How can we contact any of the admins? (They left no email address and Wikia doesn't have one either). ... -- Kobi - [[ :Kobi|( )]] 12:58, 11 April 2006 (UTC) Update has 30 articles now and pl:User:Dax is active in creating new articles, however pl:Robin Lefler looks very much like an apocryph article, shouldn't the canon policy count for all language editions? -- Kobi 10:38, 23 April 2006 (UTC) :I just read about Memory Alpha's canon policy in FAQ, and you have right, Kobi. I knew that ST New Frontier isn't a canon and I shouldn't add those non-canon information. I will make some corrections in those articles, but I have one question: if I put those articles (unchanged) into Novels category instead Characters category, is that will be OK? -- Dax Current style is to put a very minor note about "apocryph" appearence of characters into the background section of an article (example: Spock#Apocrypha). You can of course copy the New Frontier parts of the articles to a page similar to Star Trek: New Frontier characters or on the novel page itself if it is not a novel series (example: Ghosts#Characters). -- Kobi 12:27, 23 April 2006 (UTC) (sv) Swedish version Statistics : 1200 articles since November 2003 Since there are no replies about my concerns on Memory Alpha talk:Start a new edition in another language I have to post this more public it seems: What will happen to the Esperanto, Polish, and Swedish versions? How can we contact any of the admins? (They left no email address and Wikia doesn't have one either). Currently MA/sv is a spam fest for vandals and no admin around. -- Kobi - [[ :Kobi|( )]] 12:58, 11 April 2006 (UTC) :I don't understand why we even have an Esperanto edition... Enough people (several German-speaking members and at least one who speaks Swedish, to my knowledge) prefer the English edition over their own languages, so I can't understand why anyone would want to read it. I could be wrong though. :The Swedish edition at least has content, so the only thing I can think of is to have some English-language admin keep an eye on it until someone else comes along and picks up the project. --Vedek Dukat Talk | Duty Roster 22:18, 11 April 2006 (UTC) ::I check them from time to time as well. Perhaps sysop rights should be granted to all English admin for the other MAs. That way they could block obvious spammers and vandals, even if they dont speak the language (page blanking and spam looks the same in every language). Jaz talk 04:13, 13 April 2006 (UTC) :::I don't think every english admin should have the sysop rights, but rather 1 or 2 who check these wikis every 2-3 days, because many of them won't care about these wikis and there's no need for 20 admin on each versions (people who have questions don't know who to contact in that case). Furthermore, the other languages admin should inform about their presence (saying for example they watch the recent changes "once each week every saturday"...) and absence (holiday, administration stop...). I think a special page should be created for this like "Memory Alpha:other MA versions discussions" (rather than the Ten Forward) to discuss these specific problems. Concerning MA-fr, I watch the changes generally every days (at least every 2 days), I also granted Kobi the admin rights. If I haven't any disponibilities for a while, I will inform you, don't worry :). - Philoust123 12:50, 13 April 2006 (UTC) ::::I contacted Wikia once about that, and the answer basically was that "orphaned wikis" typically don't get closed. Instead, they eventually will be put up "for adoption". It might be best if that was done by the MA-community, but I'm personally not going to adopt a swedish wiki... I'm sure there's a way for one or several of the existing admins here to become an admin there as well, if necessary. ::::What's more important than that is the fact that apparently, it is possible for anyone to create a new MA/xx project via Wikia without consulting with the rest of the MA-community. I guess there's no way around that, considering that Wikia "pays the bill" so to speak... -- Cid Highwind 10:46, 22 April 2006 (UTC) (tl) Klingon? I suggest we create a user project to translate MA into Klingon and convert the Esperanto wiki to that language. Wouldn't it be more sensible for a Star Trek site to have Klingon? Weyoun 21:00, 14 April 2006 (UTC) :A possible "MA/Klingon" should use the fake language code for the Klingon language (tl/tlh), not misuse the Esperanto one. Anyway, I don't see much potential for that... -- Cid Highwind 21:13, 24 April 2006 (UTC) Language index OK, first of all, I'm new to this Wiki stuff, so excuse me if this question/suggestion doesn't meet any formatting standarts or is in the completely wrong place, but here it goes anyway: Right now the address http://www.memory-alpha.org automatically redirects every visitor to the English language edition of the site and while I know Star Trek has its foundation in the anglophon (Is that the correct word?) areas and countries and that most of its fans come from there and that this edition has the most content of them all I find this situation to be a bit unfair towards the other language editions. I propose the implementation of a kind of language index page like Wikipedia has to allow new visitors to discover other language editions of the site more easily and maybe even put a link there which allows people to start a new edition. I in no way mean to step on anyone's toes, I just wanted to bring this to your attention. Additionally, I have also posted this same question/suggestion in the German and French editions of Ten Forward to see what the people there think of the idea.--Bell'Orso 22:08, 8 May 2006 (UTC) :It should at least be more prominent on the EN Main Page. At least the German, Spanish, and French versions as they are the biggest. But English is 3x as big as DE or ES, and 9-10x as big as FR so its far more likely to find an article at EN. Of course, making it more obvious that there are other languages might help them grow. :On another note, the stylesheets at ES and FR are still broken from the upgrade. They need to be copied from the DE or EN wikis by an admin. Cid Highwind said something a while ago about re-doing the skin so that it didn't replace monobook but I don't what the progress is on that at the moment. --Bp 22:47, 8 May 2006 (UTC) ::I added links to other versions of MA more prominently to my Main Page suggestion. I deliberately did not add the "Start a new edition" to that listing, because I think we have enough inactive languages already... Regarding the stylesheet comment - yes, I'm still trying to get that started, but no reply from Jason yet. -- Cid Highwind 08:09, 9 May 2006 (UTC) Yes, right now it IS much more likely to find an article in English than in any other language. That is precisely WHY I am suggesting to feature the other existing languages more prominently. Maybe you're right that adding a link to start a new language edition would not be such a bright idea, but I still think we should have the address point to a language index.--Bell'Orso 08:37, 9 May 2006 (UTC) :::I said not for the moment on the french MA because english version is the most complete and most viewed version. In that case, the english visitor (in majority) will click 2 times to access MA-en (Main Page / Index => Main Page), whereas the french visitor will click 2 times as before to access MA-fr (Main Page => Accueil MA-fr / Index => Accueil MA-fr). Furthermore, most users can use the favorite links to place his prefered version rather than the simple MA.org. - Philoust123 12:30, 9 May 2006 (UTC) I know that those people who already know about the other language editions won't see much of a difference, but I think it would help those people who don't visit here every day to become interested in joining and helping more easily when they see what languages are already present.--Bell'Orso 16:32, 9 May 2006 (UTC) Featured articles on other MA versions Wikipedia puts a star on interwiki links when an article is well done on another language version (see for example here). Is it possible to do it here also for at least featured articles ? As a french, I rather go on the wikipedia-en than the -fr, even if I would prefer reading an article in french, because it is often more complete on -en, unless I see that star. - Philoust123 19:48, 1 June 2006 (UTC) :Sure it should be possible to introduce them, however you need to know that at least the German Wikipedia discontinues the useage of those templates ... I wonder if it is really useful here too: how many languages does the average archivist speak? -- Ⓚⓞⓑⓘ 15:31, 2 June 2006 (UTC) Inactive editions :(Also continuing the discussion from Memory Alpha talk:Start a new edition in another language) I just had a little chat with Angela after seeing that the swedish MA was, again, full of spam that hasn't been reverted for at least days, in some cases weeks! Regarding spam, one option Angela reminded me of is the spam blacklist. Although having at least one active admin per edition would be far better, of course, suggesting spam URLs found on the inactive MA editions here will at least lead to removal of the spam within a week. Regarding existing inactive editions, according to Angela closing them is not an option (partly due to technical restrictions, as it seems). If someone wants to volunteer (preferably someone who already is an admin on one of the other MA editions), I could talk to Angela about making that someone an admin on the editions that currently lack an active admin. To prevent more inactive editions in the future... Currently, "Step 1" of Memory Alpha:Start a new edition in another language is the only step necessary to create a new MA edition. If we agree to change that procedure, we could avoid future projects that "go nowhere", or lack admin access. Possible changes I could think of are: *Need to provide X contributors willing to work on the new edition (signature collection on a user project, perhaps?) *Need to make at least one current admin also an admin on the new edition (avoiding completely parallel structures) *Have a common bureaucrat for all editions (basically acting as a last failsafe if all admins of that edition go missing. I'd volunteer for that if there aren't any objections). -- Cid Highwind 14:31, 6 July 2006 (UTC) :Yes I agree the system needs to be changed. Especially since the new language editions are able to start without prior approval of the current membership or vision that there are enough members to care for it. -- Kobi 16:21, 6 July 2006 (UTC)